College students are using LifeChurch.tv’s free Bible app to persuade people away from the faith. According to research, some young adults use YouVersion, one of the most popular aps of all time, to use the Bible (and their own interpretation of it) to persuade people away from Christianity. One atheist, who wouldn’t give her full name, said she knows a lot of atheists who came to unbelief by actually reading the Bible.
“Reading the full story with all its contradictions and violence and sexism, it should make you think, ‘Is this really what I believe in?’ At least it did for me,” she told Religion News Service as reported by Charisma News.
App creator Bobby Gruenewald at LifeChurch.tv in Edmond, Oklahoma said he knows that people are using the app that way, but he views it as “a win to bring the Bible into the conversation. I think it is a positive thing,” he said.
“Young nonbelievers like to have those discussions,” said Hemant Mehta, a Chicago blogger and expert on young atheists. “They love to show the Bible can say anything you want it to say.”
And Bible apps, he said, “make stronger atheists.”
“Nothing makes you an atheist faster than reading the Bible,” he said. “It’s one of those beautiful side effects of having these Bibles free and easily accessible.”
But Elizabeth Drescher, a Santa Clara University lecturer who studies the nonreligious, says there is nothing new about atheists and believers using the latest technology to engage and debate. “All of the kinds of things that people have always done in other ways they are now doing with digital technology to the extent that there are apps to support them,” she said. “So yes, people are using these apps in the context of those conversations, but I don’t think those conversations are any more active than they have been in the last decade.”
